tearmeapart writes "It may be time again for another discussion/flamewar on the reasons why a lot of us are (still) using Microsoft. The last big discussion on Slashdot was close to 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then: Windows XP and 7 have proven to be stable (and memories of Windows ME are mostly gone.) There are many more distributions for Linux, especially commercial options. Distributions like Ubuntu and CentOS have made GNU/Linux more friendly. Options for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. have grown. Apple and their products have changed considerably, though their philosophy hasn't. Microsoft Silverlight came and is on the way out. Wine and solutions like Transgaming have matured. So... why are a lot of us still using Windows? What would it take for us to switch?"

Brad1138 writes "You see complaints about the 'next gen' GUI's all over the place, but do we really all hate them? Personally, I don't like them — I tried very hard to like Unity in Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 before giving up and switching to Mint (I am very happy there currently). But is it the vocal minority doing all the complaining, or is it the majority? Are we just too set in our ways?"

itwbennett writes "The Banshee music application, and Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, on which Banshee is dependent, may be excluded from the next release of Ubuntu. In 'a blog entry titled Bansheegeddon,' Banshee and Mono developer Joseph Michael Shields says the reasons given for the change are that Banshee is 'not well maintained' and 'porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3.' Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn't work on ARM. Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon pointed out in a blog post that the decision to drop Banshee, Mono or other apps that are dependent on Mono has not been finalized. But the blogosphere is lit up with speculation that this is a deliberate move to exclude Mono because of its emulation of Microsoft .NET."

gbl08ma writes "According to various sources, the ISO image size for the upcoming Long-Term Support Ubuntu version 'Precise Pangolin' will not fit on a regular CD, since the image size is expected to weigh around 750MB instead of the usual ~700MB. The idea is that users should either flash the image to a USB flash drive or burn it to a DVD. The extra room on the disc image could allow for integration of more GNOME3 components and Canonical applications. There was also a proposal to use a 1.5GB DVD image as the default download for Ubuntu 12.04."

jfruhlinger writes "In a world where 'app' is the new buzzword, the development of native Linux apps is lagging. Some of this can be attributed to the usual community infighting (the latest version of which is argument about Ubuntu's Unity interface), but there may be something deeper at play: Linux advocates have for so long advocated browser-accessed software as a service as a way to break out of Microsoft's proprietary desktop. Now that this world has arrived, there's less incentive to work on native Linux apps. But of course, entrusting your functionality and data to a cloud provider like Google has its own set of concerns for free software fans."

First time accepted submitter Z_God writes "Disappointed with KDE 4's performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Tuesday the first major update of the Trinity Desktop Environment was released providing an alternative upgrade path for KDE users that do not feel comfortable with KDE 4. The Trinity Desktop Environment should provide a fast and familiar experience for all users expecting a traditional desktop environment. Packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora from the Trinity project site."

darthcamaro writes "There are a lot of us that really don't like Unity. Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth defended Unity today, arguing that even 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of use. Then again he admitted that some of us are just too cool even for Unity. 'There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them,' Shuttleworth said. 'Fortunately in Ubuntu there are tons of options and lots of choice and ways to skin the cat.'"

First time accepted submitter GuerillaRadio writes "Mark Shuttleworth is to announce that Canonical will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL starting today. Shuttleworth said, 'This is a natural expansion of our idea as Ubuntu as Linux for human beings. As people have moved from desktop to new form factors for computing, it's important for us to reach out to our community on these platforms. So, we'll embrace the challenge of how to use Ubuntu on smartphones, tablets and smart-screens.'"

sfcrazy writes "Ubuntu, the world's most popular GNU/Linux based operating system is celebrating its 7th year today. Ubuntu was first released on 20 October 2004. In these 7 years Ubuntu has changed the GNU/Linux desktop segment by making it more useful for ordinary user." Besides the work that Ubuntu has done to popularize and polish the Linux desktop, and to present a humane entry point for non-guru users, it's provided a base for many other distributions (like Mint and Puppy) and helped make people realize just how powerful is the Debian infrastructure that Ubuntu itself launched from.

sfcrazy points to news, posted in the current blog post about Linux mint statistics, that the Linux Mint team "has thus decided that in the next version of Linux Mint 12, they will continue to support Gnome 2, but will also introduce Gnome 3." Related news from an anonymous reader:"Contributors in the GNOME community have started a GNOME desktop user survey. The GNOME Foundation wouldn't endorse any survey, but the community has put together a 23-question desktop survey. Regardless if you use GNOME, they encourage all Linux users to participate."

Cue the Ubuntu release parties — Ubuntu 11.10 has arrived. Ars Technica has a very positive summary of the changes in 11.10; Joe Brockmeier's piece of a few weeks back explains the return to Xen to Ubuntu and the introduction of Juju (formerly Ensemble). Asks an anonymous reader: "Any outstanding reasons why I shouldn't upgrade?" YMMV, but as a long-time Ubuntu user, and like many other users, I have mixed feelings about the concerted (and now complete) move away from a conventional WIMP interface to the new Unity. With previous versions, it was possible to choose a "classic" look rather than the default of Unity; now, for good or ill, the left-hand vertical menu is a permanent desktop element. It looks great to me, in the way the Canonical developers intend: as a consistent, replicable, supportable interface to recommend to (for instance) my parents — but I'm used to (and prefer!) more traditional WIMP environments, so at least for now have switched to Linux Mint's Debian Edition.

An anonymous reader writes "The significant Linux kernel power regression reported back in April, which ended up being attributed to PCI-E Active State Power Management, is still not resolved even as Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16 approach. Until Linux is able to handle ASPM in a manner more like Windows or the device drivers explicitly set the ASPM flag, users of many modern laptops need to use the "pcie_aspm=force" option to regain much of their battery life. At least a power bug affecting newer Intel hardware with the "energy performance bias" feature has been fixed. There's more information in this LaunchPad bug report and in the latest power consumption testing."

First time accepted submitter eljefe6a writes "On September 23 at 2:30 PST the A Million Amazonian Monkeys project successfully recreated A Lover's Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. From the article: 'For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.'"

eldavojohn writes "The Metasploit Framework has come a long way and currently allows just about anyone to configure and execute exploits effortlessly. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide takes current documentation further and provides a valuable resource for people who are interested in security but don't have the time or money to take a training class on Metasploit. The highlights of the book rest on the examples provided to the reader as exercises in exploiting several older versions of operating systems like Windows XP and Ubuntu while at the same time avoiding triggering antivirus or detection. The only weak point of this book is that a couple chapters refer the reader to external texts (on stacks and registers) in order to meet requirements for crafting exploits. The book also gives the reader a brief warning on ethics as many of these exploits and techniques would most likely work on many sites and networks. If you're wondering how seemingly inexperienced groups like lulzsec constantly claim victims, this would be an excellent read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Scott James Remnant, the former Ubuntu Developer Manager at Canonical and current Ubuntu Technical Board leader, has proposed a new monthly release process for Ubuntu Linux. He acknowledges that with the six month releases there are features that end up landing way too soon, leaving them in a sour state for users. With his monthly proposal, Remnant hopes to relieve this by handling alpha, beta, and normal releases concurrently. It's unknown whether Canonical will accept the policy at this time."

koinu writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D game performance on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 with the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It's pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries."

shibashaba writes "Mandriva 2011 is out. Look around for ISOs or click here if you already have Mandriva installed. [Or use the 32-bit torrent.] Mandriva may not be as popular as Ubuntu, but they came long before and had an easy to use (and powerful) desktop back when it was almost unheard of."

First time accepted submitter phonewebcam writes "Here's something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We're still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, there seems to be a library issue which means our framerate, while good, isn't quite as spectacular as we know it can be; we're working on it as I post this) – but this is what test boards are for, and we're making great progress getting the boards running smoothly."

mike_cardwell sends in a detailed writeup of how he went about protecting a Ubuntu laptop from attacks of varying levels of sophistication, covering disk encryption, defense against cold boot attacks, and even simple smash-and-grabs. (He also acknowledges that no defense is perfect, and the xkcd password extraction tool would still work.) Quoting: "An attacker with access to the online machine could simply hard reboot the machine from a USB stick or CD containing msramdmp to grab a copy of the RAM. You could password protect the BIOS and disable booting from anything other than the hard drive, but that still doesn't protect you. An attacker could cool the RAM, remove it from the running machine, place it in a second machine and boot from that instead. The first defense I used against this attack is procedure based. I shut down the machine when it's not in use. My old Macbook was hardly ever shut down, and lived in suspend to RAM mode when not in use. The second defense I used is far more interesting. I use something called TRESOR. TRESOR is an implementation of AES as a cipher kernel module which stores the keys in the CPU debug registers, and which handles all of the crypto operations directly on the CPU, in a way which prevents the key from ever entering RAM. The laptop I purchased works perfectly with TRESOR as it contains a Core i5 processor which has the AES-NI instruction set."

MrSeb writes "With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it's clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn't quite so easy to pirate. For starters, the generic volume license keys that were so easily exploited during the early days of Windows 7 leaks will no longer be an option for pirates. Product keys also won't be shipped in the prodkey.txt file included in the build packages. Instead, installers will need to retrieve a unique key from a Microsoft web page. There's also a good possibility that the recently-surfaced fast booting patent could come into play as well. If Microsoft does indeed have designs on using a remote server to push OS code to systems at boot time, that code would be a very clever place to embed activation-related programming. Even if a crack was discovered, it would be neatly undone during a subsequent start-up sequence — similar to the way Microsoft's now-idle Windows Steady State could turn back the clock on an entire Windows installation after rebooting." Microsoft has also indirectly confirmed in a recent blog post that Windows 8 will make use of an app store.